It was the biggest peacetime emergency evacuation of Australians. More than 100 patients, some horribly injured and burnt, many fighting to stay alive, were flown by RAAF aircraft to hospitals around Australia.

For Dr Fiona Wood, the burns specialist based at Royal Perth Hospital, the aftermath of the Bali bombings in 2002 were days of anguish and gruelling work she will never forget.

Spray-on skin had been developed by Dr Fiona Wood 10 years before the Bali disaster. Photo: Stefan Gosatti.

Within 24 hours of the blasts, 28 patients were in her care, the most of any hospital. Some had burns to 90 per cent of their bodies, others terrible shrapnel and trauma injuries.

Advertisement

''I had never worked in military medicine,'' Dr Wood says. ''I had never worked in a war zone, so it was certainly beyond what we had treated in the past.''

For many doctors, treatment of burns and injuries on such a scale would be considered unmanageable, but Dr Wood had pioneered a new technique.

Spray-on skin had been developed by Dr Wood and scientist Marie Stoner 10 years before Bali but not widely used.

An alternative to painful traditional grafting techniques, the new approach took healthy cells from the patient and required only five days to be cultured before tissue could be sprayed onto the wound. Previously, it had taken 21 days to grow new skin cells.

This advanced technique was only one of the ways in which Dr Wood's team had been almost eerily well prepared for a large intake of burns victims.

For starters, a Royal Perth Hospital registrar had been in Bali when the attacks took place and had alerted Dr Wood many victims were coming her way.

The hospital had also already trialled a burns catastrophe strategy, developed with the oil and gas producer Woodside Petroleum in 2001 amid fears of a disaster at one of their facilities, such as its offshore oil drilling platforms.

As well as the plan to roll out spray-on skin on an unprecedented scale, the strategy included new ways to transport severely burnt people, propping them up in precise positions to ensure their airways were open and the circulation of blood to the wounds was maximised to control swelling.

It would be an extraordinary triumph. Twenty-five of the patients survived, only three did not. Dr Wood's spray-on skin technology, which had been met with some scepticism internationally, has been adopted around the world and become a standard treatment for severe burns.

Dr Wood, a mother of six children, was named Australian of the Year in 2005. Royal Perth Hospital and Dr Wood's burns injury research unit at the University of Western Australia, have become standard bearers for cutting edge developments in medical science.

Now, she is looking at an all encompassing approach to healing burns patients, what she calls ''scarless healing''.

In particular, Dr Wood has turned her attention to the impact of burn injuries on the nervous and immune systems. ''The next step is really understanding how the brain and how the nervous system change with burns and how that drives the immune system and the bone marrow so that we can develop novel therapies to actually drive to a scarless healing,'' she says.

As she reflects on those traumatic events 10 years ago, Dr Wood said Bali had inspired her to push harder, to learn more and to find ways to heal better and faster.

''My overwhelming feeling at that time and subsequently has been one of feeling very privileged to have been able to have helped,'' she says.

''To have been able to have influenced people's life journey when it went seriously pear shaped and that I guess is a culmination of my education and training to that point and has driven it subsequently.''

Dr Wood's team is ready again if another calamity were to occur but, she says, every burns injury is a disaster for the individual.

''One burn for that person is a disaster,'' she says. ''We're always responding to disasters every day.''